A lot of union businesses also benefit from regulatory capture and have the inside track on government contracts as their main source of income. There's no effective competition for these types of industries.

Exactly. This industry is highly regulated and the unions help write the laws and regulations. Because of that it's mostly large players and very, very few small ones. The large ones all have agreements with the unions because at their scale it's impossible not to, and to get that agreement they have to agree to only hire union.

Also a lot of the materials producers that supplied us were union, and many of them didn't want to provide services to a non-union shop. I don't know if they had any formal policies against it (probably they didn't) but anytime we called or places orders, etc we were a super low priority for them.